Baby Elephants

After leaving the Masai Market, Michelle was kind enough to invite me along on a day of site-seeing with her and her brother that coming Friday. We started the day with a trip to an elephant orphanage, where we waited behind a small rope in anxious anticipation for the animals to come get their milk. Before long they all came running out of the bushes near by and made a b-line for the milk bottles. We were able to get up close and personal with about a dozen baby elephants ranging from a few months to a couple years in age. All of the elephants at the orphanage are babies who have been rescued from the wilderness for one reason or another, often because their parents have been the victims of poaching. The elephants are taken care of and brought up to be reintroduced into the wild at a suitable time. It was really fun to be so close and watch these 'kids' splash around in the mud, eat their leaves, and exhibit their individual personalities as they played around with each other.

From the orphanage we caught a ride over to the Giraffe Center, where we were able to climb a platform and hand feed several giraffe, even getting coaxed into giving one a 'kiss'. They had obviously been through the exercise many times before and just shot out their incredibly long, sticky, purple tongues as soon as you got close and vacuumed up the feed pellets. I thought I heard one of the employees say something about them being on a diet, and to feed sparingly, but that was obviously lost in the crowd. We apparently showed up on school field trip day and were soon joined by a large group of elementary school kids.

After making sure we had a good layer of sticky giraffe saliva on our hands and my face we headed over to 'Bomas of Kenya', a performance of local music and dances from around Kenya. Apparently this was another stop on the field trip, and elementary school kids started filling the hall soon after we arrived. The performance lasted roughly two hours and exhibited nine different dances, capped off with an acrobatics show that was certainly the favorite of the school kids.